Hello everyone, I am sorry to inform you that the skype discussion with Derrick Jensen has been cancelled. Please let everyone who is not in the facebook world know.

The rest of the events for the festival of Anarchy and Victoria Anarchist Bookfair will all still be happening, and for more information on those please see our website http;//www.victoriaanarchistbookfair.ca
A full schedule for the Festival of Anarchy and the Anarchist Bookfair is on the website, starting with the Practically Radical Skillshare Sep 3-4

Also there is a recently confirmed workshop Sep 9 with Margaret Killjoy including a reading from his new Anarchist choose your own (steampunk) adventure book, called Rapid Fire Consensus. For more info on that check outhttp://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=229684500417568

Derrick Jensen has been called the philosopher poet of the environmental movement, author of over 15 books, activist and educator draws on his own experience of childhood abuse to examine violence as a pathology that afflicts every life on the planet.

Have you ever been in an abusive relationship, or do you know anyone who has? The answer to this question is far too commonly yes.

What does it mean to be in an abusive relationship?
What is the connection between abuse in personal or romantic relationships and the way we function as a society?
What is the connection between how an abuser treats those they claim to love and how we as a culture treat animals, plants, and all that is wild? All that we make into 'others?'
How does growing up in a culture of abuse, affect our personal interactions with each other, and with those we love?
have abusive relationships become the norm in today's society?

We live in what has often been described as the most violent society that has ever existed.
With 1 in 3 womyn reporting having been sexually assaulted in their lifetime, the majority of these assaults coming from family, friends or lovers. Many never report the abuse with males who have been sexually abused being even less likely to report.
A society where if you were to speak out when witnessing a person being cruel with a child you would likely be told "don't tell me how to raise my child."
A Society where when Fran Tompson kills her stalker in self defense she is sentenced to life in prison, and Aileen Wuornos is sentenced to death for killing her abusers. Over and over we find similar stories of survivors fighting back only to be punished while we here of so many cases of people convicted of child abuse getting sentences as low as 40 days like Pedro Jose Mora, or Martin Tremblay who sexually assaulted many Indigenous girls after drugging them and only gets 11 months.

This violence also translates to 90% of the old growth forests on earth having been cut, with clearcuts running miles long, dioxin in every mothers breast milk, factory farms where milk cows are forcibly impregnated to keep them producing milk, chickens have their beaks cut off with a hot wire. Where HLS kills 500 animals a day to test products already on the market like Viagra and diet pills. Where most children will first see 'wild' animals from behind the bars of a cage in a zoo, and more and more habitats are destroyed daily for 'development' while species after species goes extinct. And of course there is also the generations of genocide against the peoples who's lands we now continue to occupy.

What are the connections between these different types of violence and abuse? And what will it take to stop the cycle?
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A Language Older Than Words
A Culture Of Make believe
Listening To The Land
Railroads and Clearcuts
Walking on Water: Reading Writing and Revolution
Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control
ENDGAME
Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos
As the World Burns: 50 Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial
How Shall I Live My Life?: On Liberating the Earth From Civilization
What We Leave Behind
Songs of the Dead
Lives Less Valuable
Resistance Against Empire
Mischief in the Forest

Jensen is the winner of the Eric Hoffer Award and many others as well as being named one of Utne Reader's "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."

Derrick Jensen holds a B.Sc. in Mineral Engineering Physics from the Colorado School of Mines, and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University, and has taught creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison and Eastern Washington University

"One of the good things that emerged politically from all this abuse I endured was an early consciousness of how the political system really works. Both the courts and the church came down strongly on my father’s side. That told me that those institutions were not interested in either justice or children. Those institutions were primarily interested in maintaining power. They also are entirely corrupt."

"Everything is set up to protect the abuser and what that means is that we all conspire to help the abuser not face the implications of his abuse."

" We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear suicide and other means--all these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity."

"What I’m really interested in is stopping it. If an exorcism stops it, and I’m not being sarcastic at all, then great! If counseling stops it, great! And by the way counseling never stops it, if a bullet to the brain stops it, then that’s great too! Whatever it takes to stop the abuse."

"Most addicts don’t quit their addiction until they have hit rock bottom. When somebody is addicted to heroin, say, this is destroying their own life. The problem with abusers is they are actually do quite well – thank you very much – because the ones whose lives they are destroying are other people, so they don’t hit rock bottom, the other people do. The only way to get an abuser to change, is to force him to change. That could be, if they do actually care about their family at all, then that could be saying okay you have a choice. You change 100% or we are gone. The abuser’s system works very well for them. It’s the same as capitalism. Capitalism works very well for the capitalists. It doesn’t deal with what they really want in terms of a relationship etc because it doesn’t give a shit about that. This is probably why capitalism will not end voluntarily because those who are the beneficiary of the System gain all kinds of groovy little toys and they really don’t give a shit about who gets hurt in the process."

"Silencing is central to the workings of our culture. The staunch refusal to hear the voices of those we exploit is crucial to our domination of them."